In the Film

In this film, Robert Kaplan travels to The Philippines, Georgia, West Africa and Columbia to meet the U.S. military on the ground and explore why their role in far flung corners of the earth is so essential to global order.

A correspondent for The Atlantic, Kaplan has reported on assignment for the magazine from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and the United States. He has been prolific in recent years. His books include Imperial Grunts (2005), Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus (2000), The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (2000), An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America’s Future (1998), The Ends of the Earth (1995), The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite (1993), and Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (1993), all of which grew out of Atlantic articles.

Kaplan has been writing as a foreign correspondent for more than twenty years, and his two-decades’ worth of traveling and reporting experience — much of which he has accumulated in the world’s most difficult and dangerous places — inform even his briefest contributions. His writing always combines on-the-ground reporting, rich academic context, a deep regard for the past, and an abiding concern for the future.